Double Take review
I was ready to ask why such an intriguing, inventive film covering such interesting topics didn’t achieve a wider release. Before seeing it.
What does this film want to be? Probably a documentary, even though it has a plot, of sorts, but about what? Alfred Hitchcock? Or the Cold War? Well, it’s really predominantly the latter, to be fair, but the additional Hitchcock angle is peculiar and distracting rather than complementary. The two subjects just don’t gel; links are forged (fear, doubles) but, lordy, are they tenuous. The film is unfocused, messy and unbalanced. At just over 80 minutes it’s also too long. 80 minutes.
The film’s saving grace is the very thing that it over-relies on; the independently interesting excerpts from old American news reports, deranged TV ads and clips from Hitchcock films, interviews and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The sum of its parts are greater than the whole.
27th Apr 2010 | Official site | On IMDb
